HTC Titan review

HTC has really pushed the boat out with the HTC Titan. Not only does it have one of the biggest displays currently available, but it also has the latest iteration of Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 platform, known as Mango, and a 1.5GHz Qualcomm processor.

The Titan, as the name suggests, is a big device. At 132x71x10mm it’s even larger than last year’s HTC HD7, and, at 160g, just as heavy. The reason for these slab-like proportions is simple: the HTC Titan has a huge 4.7-inch display. Despite the screen’s huge size, the resolution isn’t spectacular: at 480×800 pixels, it’s a long way behind Samsung’s Super AMOLED Plus and Apple’s Retina Display, both in terms of pixels per inch (ppi). Yet despite this, the Titan’s display is still very impressive. Web pages, video and games look truly spectacular when viewed on the phone’s near-5-inch screen.

Because of its dimensions you’d think the handset itself would look and feel enormous. The clever design negates much of this heft, however. It’s weighted so precisely that despite being extremely large it feels perfectly balanced when held in the hand. The chassis is constructed out of a single piece of aluminium, and the Titan looks every bit the flagship handset.

The phone has a 1.5GHz Qualcomm processor and 512MB RAM. Although the processor is single rather than dual-core, we couldn’t fault the phone’s performance. When using the operating system we didn’t experience any lag whatsoever. Scrolling, typing and switching between applications is as smooth an experience as you get on the iPhone 4 and in some cases, notably text entry and scrolling, it certainly outperforms Android.

Like the HTC Radar, the Titan has an 8-megapixel camera and a backlit sensor. Still photos are particularly good in low light, and 720p video capture is reasonable, but suffers from some compression artefacts.

The Titan also has a front-facing 1.3-megapixel camera, which will eventually be used for video calling. Unfortunately the ability to video-call didn’t make the cut in Mango, so users will have to wait until the next update, known as Tango, before they can Skype on their handset.

The big news on the HTC Titan is the upgrade to Windows Phone 7.5 (Mango). This is a huge improvement on the previous version, with built-in multitasking (complete with webOS-style card view for running apps) and the faster IE 9 mobile browser. In our tests, this rendered pages faster than Safari on the iPhone 4, but our Apple iPhone 4S arrived too late for a comparison. Other headline features include deeply integrated social network support, so you can get all your Twitter, Facebook, Google and LinkedIn updates sent directly to the Windows Phone personal hub.

Other Mango improvements include Local Scout, which searches around your GPS position, the Google Goggles-like Bing Vision, accurate voice control and smarter home screen Tiles that now display more information such as new Tweets. We were previously reticent about recommending Windows Phone 7 handsets due to the lack of apps, but the numbers are growing rapidly – there are now thousands to choose from, so you no longer have to put up with a second-rate range.

We’re seriously impressed by Windows Phone 7.5, and if you’re willing to take the plunge the HTC Titan’s huge screen makes it an ideal showcase for the OS. If you’re after something smaller and cheaper, though, you’ll get a similar experience from the HTC Radar.